Manual fruit pickers for collecting fruit from fruit trees are well known to those skilled in the art. Thus, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 4,928,461 discloses a picking head for a fruit bag adapted to be attached to the distal end of an elongated pole; it includes a cutting blade mounted on it so that a worker may extend the bag and picking head to an elevated position. Thus, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 4,531,352 discloses a pole mounted fruit-picking device which contains a double ring jaw assembly mounted on the end of a pole; the bottom jaw is stationary and the upper ring has a cutting edge. The disclosure of each of these patents is hereby incorporated by reference into this specification.
The availability of inexpensive, manual labor for picking fruit has diminished in recent years; and, with the explosion of litigation and regulation in many areas of society, the use of such manual labor has grown substantially less desirable.
It is an object of this invention to provide an automatic fruit picker which can efficiently and automatically locate and pick fruit from fruit trees.